Cloud computing may be viewed as the provisioning of scalable computing resources as a service over a network. More formally, cloud computing may be defined as a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Cloud computing services are typically licensed under the subscription license model, in which software licenses are leased to rather than owned by users. For example, several types of predefined licenses (e.g., standard, enterprise, etc.) may be provided for a cloud computing service. In such a case, a user is required to pay for all features included in a predefined license, even if the user does not actually use some of those features.